dust you are and dust you shall return

Lent is that season in the church year where we resolve to give something up. Most of us probably choose  something like sweets or a recreational activity or anything that we can eliminate from our lives for the next 40 days.

There is nothing wrong with this and ought to be encouraged, but I believe that it doesn't get to the heart of Lent and can even leave Lent as a lukewarm experience.

Lent is perhaps the season of the Church year that is most life giving. This may seem paradoxical, and indeed it is meant to be. How is a season where we deprive ourselves and talk about sin and death be a time of life?

We give up these things for Lent because we are supposed to be reminded that we do not need these things to live and survive. We are forced into a period of simplicity and purgation that ought to show us just how blessed we are with what we have and realize how little we need to live a full life.

In the same breath, we are also focusing on our sinfulness and our eventual death. This can seem and feel a little uncomfortable to talk about outside of a "church setting". I know that I am cautious to bring up the topic of death in conversation with family and friends - it is just not something we talk about casually or openly. But, we are called to during these 40 days. We are called to examine our sinfulness and our death.

Remember, it was sin that brought about death. We were created to be eternal and death as we know it was not 'in the original plan'. Adam and Eve first sinned and that sin ruptured our relationship with God and brought about a physical death that we all must go through by nature of our sinfulness. The only human (let's leave Christ out of this for now) that never died was our Blessed Mother...and she never sinned!

This is a reality of our lives and our existence. No one will escape death. Death will take hold of each of us. We can't hide from its presence anymore than we can from God's.

When those we love die, we experience incredible grief, pain and loneliness. We go through those emotions because this was not supposed to be this way. We are separated and we long to be - we were made to be - connected and in communion. This is the ultimate price of love. If you love someone, you will experience pain - throughout your relationship and through death.

This is where life comes in! "Remember, man, you are dust and to dust you shall return". When we realize that we are going to die. When we realize that we are sinful. We begin to see what it means to live.
We see that we are meant to live for others and Christ. We cannot take any fame, glory or wealth with us to the grave - the Psalms are peppered with this reminder. We begin to realize that living for others is the ultimate purpose of our lives. We don't love to serve ourselves - we're going to die and not bring any of our 'stuff' with us. We are meant to live for love. We are made to love others and to love God. This is the only thing that lasts and that goes with us through the death's portals.

Remembering that we are all dust frees us to purge our lives of possession, addictions, selfishness and be able to live that Lenten Trifecta of prayer, fasting and almsgiving.

Our death also guarantees that we will have eternal life. Only through death does the resurrection come. "You can't have Easter Sunday without Good Friday" as the saying goes.

Yes, death and sin are sobering thoughts and can lead us into some very arid spiritual deserts - this is good and necessary for all of us. The spiritual life is not meant to be cushy and luscious all the time - if it is for you, you may not be challenging yourself to grow. But, when we come out of these deserts, we will know the true value of refreshing water. We will no longer take for granted that faucet of life, but will cherish every satiating drop that flows forth.

Remember, man, dust you are and dust you shall return

7th Sunday Ordinary Time: Your sins are forgiven

Humanity, in  the past two decades or so, has acquired an immunity and desensitization to much of the violence, gore, sex, horror and whatnot that gets presented to us in media.

Think about all the music, movies, TV, games and everything else that literally puts us in the midst of so much horrible things and scenes. We have become a people who don’t look away, gasp, get repulsed or sick at seeing these images.

Don’t get me wrong; I am a media junkie. I love so many genres of music, movies and television and many that presents much of this stuff. I love a good movie of war, violence, horror, etc. Who doesn’t?

My point is not to demonize anything media related. I only mean to point out and make us aware of the reality that we have in so many ways become immune and desensitized to nearly everything put forth in our favorite media. It is something interesting to think about and realize. I think that part of taking ownership of ourselves is knowing ourselves and recognizing the blind spots in our lives, and I think this is one blind spot that all of us have.

There is another blind spot we need to acknowledge that predates R rated films by millennia, that is the magnitude of the effects of sin in our lives.

Two episodes of the mercy towards the sinfulness of humanity are shown to us.

Isaiah shows us of God essentially telling the people “I know your sins. I know how weak and vulnerable you are. But you know what, I love you. I love you and I forgive you. Let’s move on”. In the Gospel, Christ is presented with a man lowered through the roof of his house! What is telling about this encounter is that instead of healing his paralysis, Christ forgives him of his sin.

The Gospel gives us no indication of disappointment on the man’s part, but I think many of us feel it inside when we really think about it. If we came to Christ and wanted some physical ailment healed and, instead, He forgave us of our sins, would we be disappointed?

Sin has stripped something out of the core of our souls. It has left an emptiness and yearning inside of us the we have become all too often immune to in it affects. Because there is a hollowness inside of us, we naturally try to fill it up and it often gets filled with sin. Because that hole appears and feels filled, we don’t realize it is even there or the hazards of it. So we go days, weeks, months or years without really thinking about sin. We live in the midst and stench of that sin and we don’t even recognize it. We don’t feel sorrowful , shameful, embarrassed, or guilty. We essentially numb ourselves to sins effects because we have fooled ourselves into thinking that we aren’t hurting ourselves or others and we end up justifying our actions.

We are desensitized to sin!

But God does see this and He desires nothing more than to fill that hole with His love, mercy and the intimacy of a relationship with Him. This healing is essential to our salvation and our coming to know and experience God and the beauty of life.

When Christ says, “Your sins are forgiven”, He is performing a greater miracle than the physical healing of the man’s paralysis by saying “Rise, pick up your mat and walk”.

When a priest utters, “I absolve you of your sins” in the sacrament of Confession, he too is performing that awesome and essential miracle: the forgiveness of sins.

This is our last Sunday of Ordinary Time for a couple months. We enter the season of Lent this Wednesday when we will dive deep into the reality of sin and death before we immerse ourselves in the mystery of life and resurrection at Easter.

We need to not only acknowledge blind spots in our lives like our immunity to violence in film and TV, but also the effects of sin in our lives. We need to start yearning for those words of forgiveness, mercy, intimacy and love.

We need to start recognizing our need for those words of Christ “Child, your sins are forgiven”.

Sixth Sunday OT: He Touched Him

"He stretched out His hand and Touched him"

For 2 years, my senior year of high school and my first year of college, I lived with my grandma and great-grandma. It was a blessing to be able to, not only know my great-grandma, but also live with her. Over that period we got very close, even to the point of calling her one of my best friends. In the last few months of her life, she got quite ill - heart, cancer and old age. I had the honor of helping to care for her on a daily basis and tried to make her comfortable as much as possible.

Each night, for the ten years I knew her and especially the 2 I lived with her, I would give her a hug and kiss as I said "goodnight". Well, in the last days of her life, being touched was painful for her. Her body was so racked in pain that the slightest touch could send her gasping in pain. One night, her pain was so great that I couldn't give her a hug as I had done for a decade because of the pain and discomfort. That night, she died.

"He stretched out His hand and Touched him"

The leper came to Christ. The leper was a man racked in utter pain. Not only was the disease probably unimaginably painful, but he was throbbing with emotional and spiritual pain as well.

As we heard in the first reading, lepers had to be cast out and let others know they were infected. Think about how humiliating that must have been. This man was cast out from his community, his family and friends, the temple and all normal human interaction. He was lonely and in utter darkness. He couldn't do anything he wanted or desired. Every human need, longing and desire was forbidden because of a disease he had not asked for.

It was the custom and law not to touch a leper for fear of contracting the disease yourself and for becoming impure. But, Christ did not come to follow social norms or what was popular or to be politically correct; Christ came to bring Life and Love regardless what man expected.

When the leper  begged Christ to be healed, he was begging Him to be touched, to have his pain taken away, to be loved and accepted and cared for again. The leper was on the brink of death from all he had gone through and endured. Christ saw this, was moved with pity and touched him and he was healed.

Christ is showing us something fundamentally essential. He is telling and showing us that the way of life and love is not through social norms; it is not through doing what is popular or expected, and not through what is safe for me. The way of life and love is through going outside of ourselves and touching others, even if there is great risk to ourselves. Christ Himself risked being infected, made impure and cast out, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that this man needed love, healing and touch.

We are called to touch the lives and hearts of all people, regardless of who they are or the cost to ourselves. We are to operate and act outside of ourselves and give of ourselves wholly and completely without counting the cost. This is the only way to give the love of Christ to others just as He gives it to us.

I couldn't give my grandma a hug that night because the pain was too unbearable for her. But, we are called to 'hug', to love and to 'touch' others so that is hurts us. We are shown that the way of Christ is to live for others and not ourselves. The true touch of love and life is that where I risk a sacrifice of myself. We are called to offer our bodies, comforts and securities for the sake of love, just as Christ did for us.

"He stretched out His hand and Touched him"